Day: May 15, 2017

Freely spending on avocados — the pricey, popular superfruit beloved by young people — may be one of the reasons why some young people can’t afford a house, according to Australian millionaire and property mogul Tim Gurner.

“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” Gurner told the Australian news show 60 Minutes.

Only 32% of home owners were first-time buyers in 2016, the lowest point since 1987, according to a study by NerdWallet. A recent study by HSBC found that American millennials have a homeownership rate of 35%, and in Australia only about 28% of millennials own their homes. Cost is often a major factor in millennials’ decisions to buy — the study found that a lot of young homeowners got a financial boost from their parents when making their purchase.

If Trump had run as a Democrat (It wouldn’t have been much of a stretch up to a few years ago when he started attacking Obama, I think the only party he really has allegiance to is himself) I would hope that liberals everywhere would be taking this stance against him and to those who are complicit:

Hey, remember last week when everyone was worried because Trump let Russian photographers into the oval office where one could have easily placed a bug? No need. Trump just blabs everything to the Russians:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

According to Comrade Trump’s own words, he is not fit to be President:

Crooked Hillary Clinton and her team "were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information." Not fit!

Am I the only one who, despite thinking Trump a vile bullshit-shoveling, third rate used car salesman type pitchman, dictator-worshipping orange blight on our country who may actually be the president who leads us into a nuclear holocaust, thinks that the election could actually have been worse if this guy

had been elected President?

During the Sally Yates hearing when he made an appearance, my instinct reaction was, “Oh thank Zeus he didn’t win!” followed by my train of thought doing a lot of calculations to figure out if I was an idiot or not before my brain crashed. I asked a few friends what they thought and every time, they paused to think it over before saying, “Oh, yeah, I guess it could have been worse.”

What say you Cynics? I’m sorry for even making your brain do this exercise.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Trump.

Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.

Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.